Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (33 page)

As sure as anyone can be about anything.

A number of years back, Mathilde had watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a polar bear mom who had cannibalized her cubs in a German zoo.
As humans, we tend to think of parental care as a very loving and nurturing behavior, which it of course is most of the time,
the voice-over narrated.
But sometimes there is a darker side to parental care, and understanding behaviors such as this often requires a very close look at what's going on.
The show had taken note of the reasons parents might eat their young, none of which were mutually exclusive. For instance, they could be weeding out inferior offspring, or they could very well be hungry.

-
Just hungry, -
Mathilde had thought.

Quickly Mathilde imagined herself on a desert island. Lucy was already dead, her dead legs resting like two cold pipes on Mathilde's shivering, frantic, alive lap. And Mathilde was starving. She got farther than she should have. Then a stupefied pain clutched her between her lips and stomach. She looked for a hand mirror, a tabletop surface—anything that could show her own face. The ocean! A manic glance into the ruminative foam showed her the grotesque avatar of maternal contrast. Her entire mouth, throat, and belly were layered in thorns. Too weapon, too succubus—scarcely mother.

Mathilde closed her eyes, considering the notion that she had been coming to so ghoulishly often: -
how could such a terribly wrong thing be allowed to happen? -
leaving the supermarket holding two peaches and a bag of grapes. Pizzas and guppies clothed in plastic. How could they be shrouded in plastic and still be living? How was it that they could live and not move?

Ma'am, you're going to have to come back inside,
said a bag boy. His nametag read
DIRK
. Mathilde looked around and realized she was outside with the peaches and the grapes and no daughters.

Excuse me?

You didn't pay.

Okay,
said Mathilde.
But who cares?

Dirk guided her by the elbow inside. Inside, where the air was faithfully cold and the speakers blew The Five Stairsteps into the aisles. Like a prelude, the walls wooed with:
Ooh child, things are gonna get easier.
Dirk picked up the phone.

Besides his acne scars and the message he was sending to her with his posture, Mathilde noticed he was handsome. A well-built chin and snowflakey lashes. Maybe Mathilde could hit on him, even sit on him, exercise her flirting like a lethargic muscle. Even in the early days of being married to Claudio,
Mathilde would love to go out with her single friends and wingwoman. It just did something to her, filled the candid louvre inside whining -
nobody will ever like you enough. -

Who are you calling?
asked Mathilde, thinking -
Ghostbusters. -
Their whole family loved that movie, grew up watching it on weekends while eating chocolate soufflés. Claudio would say,
wifey, tell me again what we did on Saturday nights before the girls?
Mathilde would say,
you know, city stuff. Not much.
Claudio would ask her,
why did we waste our time?
Claudio used to say,
can you believe we have all this?
Claudio used to say,
how can so much beauty fit into one room?
Carly and Natasha and Lucy would give mouthy laughs and make funny faces to be less lovely. Mathilde would make the soufflés, which would take all day. Nobody in the family would seem to realize all the effort it took her. Her husband and daughters—they were always asking her for more.

The manager,
said Dirk,
who will probably call the police.

I didn't do anything wrong,
said Mathilde.
My daughter Lucy used to call peaches pizzas. I would have taken her food shopping with me, but I'm afraid she's dying.

Dirk made a ribbiting, Kermit the Frog–like sound as he spoke.
Ma'am, you're going to have to calm down.

Okay,
said Mathilde.

He laughed, breaking his own character.
You look like you could use a nap and a bottle of vodka.

And my husband,
Mathilde said, unhappy with him for being right. She took out her credit card.
I'm really sorry. I promise I'm an okay person,
she maintained. She paid for the fruit, took it in a paper bag, and called Claudio.

Can you take off in the next hour? I'm blue,
peddled Mathilde.

Just briefly she thought, -
I could leave right now. Leave the family that makes such a mess of me and never look back. -
Claudio would never know, though it would always be an atrocious thought that existed, and would proceed to exist, albeit cloaked. But there was no sense in taking precautions about thoughts
because, Mathilde had realized long ago, thinking cannot be controlled nor helped.

Yes,
said Claudio.
We'll order Chinese. Watch a movie.

Yes,
said Mathilde. Claudio was good that way. He'd talk with her—if she pleased—about their daughters or about themselves. But likely, for both of their sakes, about nothing that might be important.

W
hen Claudio walked into the kitchen and saw Carly sitting on the counter with Stephen touching her eyelid, he screamed.

His whole life, Claudio hadn't understood why people screamed. He understood a kid screaming at his or her mom during a fight, fine. When else should people ever have to scream? Grown-ups should never gratuitously scream, was his conviction. Never scream at all unless it was an extreme situation. Like an emergency.

What the fuck are you doing?
Who was this dumbass kid, trying to hurt his little girl? Stephen. Some kid who claimed to love his daughter. Nobody could ever love Carly more than Claudio.

He was still coming to terms with the idea of his daughter having a boyfriend. Stephen seemed like a passable kid, but up until then Claudio hadn't had to worry about boys. He couldn't resist every time the situation seemed to germinate: once, when he caught Lucy looking through LJ's Facebook pictures, he said,
he looks like a psycho.
Once, when he picked up Natasha from school, he saw her talking to one of her classmates, John.
Who was that geek?
Claudio had asked.

He didn't like that Carly had a boyfriend, though he knew this revulsion was illogical. If Lucy had been healthy, he didn't
think he wouldn't've minded. Carly's handling of Lucy was different from Natasha's—she seemed sympathetic but not as involved, spending nearly every afternoon and evening at Stephen's house. And Claudio hated this. He knew it didn't make enough sense to articulate but felt the loathing all the same.

Daddy! What's wrong with you? My contact fell out. Stephen was just trying to put it in.

Claudio's ears went flannelette-white. Had his own, grueling eyes been so insistent?
I don't understand.

Why did you freak out?
asked Carly.

Yeah, is everything okay, Mr. Simone?
asked Stephen.

I'm sorry for yelling, son. It looked . . .
Claudio bit the top of his lip, swallowing his philippic. god. What his daughters did to him.

Strange, from where I was standing.
Claudio had never told his daughters about the time in the pool. He hadn't even ever told his wife. They just assumed Jane's illness was chemical. And of course it was, something carried through genes, like other illnesses. Claudio could not have been a trigger, but that didn't help his guilt. Claudio went into his bathroom, looked at himself. How revoltingly relieved he felt for having one daughter of his be adopted. Should anything happen to her genetically, the blame would be placed off him. He was a sick bastard, wasn't he?

Jane had gone off her rocker. When would he? Could it be a matter of time? Could he too surprise himself with his capability? He'd been unable to stop Jane, after all. They shared genes and a history. Given the circumstances, he was sure he could slip into lunacy just as effortlessly. He took off his shirt and stared at his forsaken torso. -
The shirtless criminal is never soft. He has no bad genes. He is a man. Be a man
, - Claudio told himself.
Just
a man, but a man. There was only so much a man could do, but there was a lot a man could do.

Claudio dead-bolted his dominant hand into a fist. He was left-handed, and none of his daughters were. Where had his
other genes gone? His cleft chin. His attached earlobes. His thick calf gene. His sweet tooth gene. Were they still carrying them all, recessively? Would it matter if Lucy even was? He thought about all of the little useless eggs inside of his daughter's body. His wonderful half-portions of grandchildren, the grandchildren with Lucy's eyes and mouth and toes, who'd never be born.

Claudio was certain his Heart would turn blue if any of his daughters left him. He thought about all of the times he made sure they wore their seat belts. All the times he made sure they took their vitamins.

- Surviving, -
he thought,
- is different from living. -

Mathilde rested her head that night in the soft cup of her husband's lap.
How could our daughter just get sick the way she did? And what does a mother do?

It's not your fault,
said Claudio.
It's god's fault.

Since when do you attribute things to god? Who is god, anyway?

god?
asked Claudio, cracking his knuckles, staring at the ceiling. Mathilde didn't know whom he was addressing until he said,
god's a word.

Mathilde glutted a tissue. It was so safe of people who said things like
it will all work out
because, fuck, it didn't. Right after Mathilde's father died, she'd told her mother that she decided she didn't believe in god. And her mother had asked her if that made her sad. And Mathilde sat and felt about it for a while. And then she decided no—if anything, she felt relieved. god was like a taxing family member.

You know what my worst fear used to be?
asked Mathilde.
It used to be that one of the girls would disappear suddenly, and that we wouldn't know what happened to them. We'd put their pictures on milk cartons. But you know what I'm thinking now? Maybe it's worse to know.

Hope can keep most people going,
agreed Claudio.
But it doesn't work for me.

Why not?
asked Mathilde. This thought sliced through her conscious: -
I'm having an abortion, seventeen years and six months too late. -

Claudio looked at her.
I never said I didn't want it to. I've tried. It just doesn't.

In this teaspoon-moment they kissed.

Did you know,
Mathilde asked Claudio,
that you smell exactly the same as the way you did when you were twenty-three?

Stop it,
said Claudio.
We can't be silly.
He thought about how when they were younger, they'd spend selfish hours just chasing each other around their apartment. What did they think was so funny? How had they been so happy?

I'm not being silly,
said Mathilde, eyes splintered with tears, recalling her former splendor of crying, when she pushed it on herself. The good old days.
I'm being serious.

F
or her final history project, Carly chose to write a paper on Judaic history in a contemporary Christian-dominated European city.
Find history in what's been destroyed,
her teacher had said.
Find meaning in what isn't there.

Carly picked Venice, Italy, with
only two rooms
in its Venetian Jewish historical museum, because most of its artifacts had been destroyed in the Holocaust. -
Pathetic, -
thought Carly, studying its pictures on the Internet.

Stephen read over her paper and edited it.
The ideas were all yours,
he said,
I just cleaned them up.

Thanks,
said Carly.

Stephen said,
at my grandfather's funeral, a six-year-old neighbor of mine asked me if my grandfather was history.

History could be safe or devastating in its finitude, like math or medicine or science. Carly thought about doctors, understanding it was their job to separate themselves from the emotional component of their work. But how were they able to desensitize themselves? How could Lucy not manage to break everybody's Heart, including her surgeons and nurses? Maybe they cried in secret, like in the janitorial supply closet. Maybe they felt very great pain efficiently, getting compassion out of their systems as pragmatically as taking cigarette breaks.

Stephen and Carly went into the kitchen. Stephen sliced two crumpets and two biscotti in half and toasted them. Stephen's family kept hip snacks: smoked gouda, baklava, wasabi peas.

I've always toyed with the idea of getting the same tattoo that my grandfather had. The same number. I had heard of some Israeli grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who'd done that. As a way of saying
fuck you
to history. Also, because I never want anyone to forget about what had happened.

That's intense,
said Carly.

That's what everybody said,
said Stephen.
My mother said it would have killed him. But we'll never know, because he died a couple of years before.

Carly traced his hip tattoo: the word
lux
in cursive.
Lux,
meaning “light,” in Latin.
The first word I ever said was
light, Stephen said.